But more than half of workers in some parts of the region work in jobs most at risk

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SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – MARCH 24: The Starbuck on Geary Street in San Francisco’s Union Square is boarded up as the coronavirus shutdown enters its second week, Tuesday, March 24, 2020. (Karl Mondon/Bay Area News Group)

Bay Area companies and startups have not been immune from the tsunami of layoffs and furloughs in California, which has pushed 3.2 million residents to apply for unemployment insurance since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

But the region could be cushioned from some of the worst damage, thanks to its large share of the workforce in science, information and finance, which are less at risk from unemployment, according to a report published by the Economic Roundtable, a Los Angeles-based research nonprofit. The Bay Area is home to the three counties in California that have the lowest share of workers at high risk for unemployment.

“It’s more of a knowledge-based economy in the Bay Area,” said Daniel Flaming, president of the Economic Roundtable. “In the Southern California area, it’s more personal service and retail.”

In San Francisco, 33 percent of workers were at high risk for unemployment, the report found. That’s the lowest percentage for any county in the state. That was followed by Marin and Santa Clara counties with 35 percent of their workers at high risk, and Alameda and San Mateo counties at 37 percent — the same share as Placer County, the non-Bay Area county with the smallest high-risk workforce. In Contra Costa County, 40 percent of workers are at high risk, a figure that’s still lower than California’s overall share of 43 percent.

Some parts of the Bay Area have even lower shares of the workforce facing unemployment — in the Los Gatos, Saratoga and Cupertino area, 19 percent of workers are at high risk, the lowest anywhere in the state. Mountain View, Palo Alto and Los Altos weren’t far behind at 21 percent, and in San Ramon and Danville, 24 percent of workers are at high risk.

But Flaming cautioned that just because there’s a smaller share of workers facing layoffs doesn’t mean the damage won’t be far-reaching.

“There are a lot of well-paid people in the tech sector,” Flaming said. “But at the same time, Santa Clara County does have people who work in restaurants, who do food prep, who are waiters or are waitressing, or retail clerks who have always struggled to make it because they’re low-wage workers in a high-price economy.”

More than half of workers in East San Jose, East Oakland and the Bayview and Hunters Point neighborhoods of San Francisco are at high risk for unemployment. That’s because residents there tend to work in the food industry, building cleaning and maintenance, construction and other jobs that have been heavily hit by the crisis. The report’s authors used an analysis from the Federal Reserve of workers at risk for unemployment matched with employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau for their analysis.

Many of those workers, Flaming said, also tend to be younger people of color. Statewide, 57 percent of Latinx workers and 60 percent of people between 16 and 24 are at high risk of losing their jobs, a much larger share than any other demographic. Younger workers and Latinx workers often work in jobs now considered essential and at the highest risk for infection, such as grocery store clerks and farmworkers.

“There is both the issue of people impacted by the layoffs but also the people who are at risk as they continue to show up on the job,” he said. “In many cases, those are the same people.”

Leonardo Castañeda is a reporter covering demographics and the income divide as part of The Mercury News’ Living in the Bay Area team. He graduated from San Diego State University with degrees in journalism and economics, and previously reported in America’s Finest City. He also speaks Spanish, holds strong opinions about burritos and can be reached at 408-920-5012.

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